Difference Between Marketing Automation And CRM: Which Is Better For Your Business?
Any company's marketing department is one of the most significant aspects of scaling their productivity and sales. As a marketing team, you need to build a good relationship with your customers and you need to automate the marketing process to scale up your business.
Why customer relationship management is difficult
However, managing customer relationships and automating the marketing process became quite difficult due to the multiple marketing channels and sales processes. If you are not using CRM software and marketing automation tools, Sales and leads are slipping away from you.
Each has a different purpose
These automation tools may appear the same. Despite appearing similar, there is a difference between marketing automation and CRM tools. Consequently, it is important to determine each software's purposes and how integrating them can benefit your company.
In today's post, We'll explain the differences between CRM and marketing automation software to help you decide which one to use in different circumstances.
The key difference between CRM and marketing automation tools:
As CRM and marketing automation tools both aid in customer outreach and relationship building, it is important to know the differences. What makes them different is how they allow you to tailor your approach to each customer and build relationships with them based on their stage of the buying process.
1. Definition: In its most basic form, marketing automation aims to manage email marketing, digital campaigns, scoring, lead tracking, and landing pages. However, CRM ensures the entire sales process is handled: lead status tracking, individual emails, pipeline reporting, opportunity tracking, and task management.
2. Funnel: CRM is primarily used at the bottom of the funnel, whereas Marketing automation is mostly used at the top of the funnel.
3. Target Audience: CRM platforms are primarily used by sales representatives, whereas a marketing automation tool assists teams with marketing tasks.
Some other striking differences
1. Purpose: An MA tool allows you to automate your campaigns by using triggers and conditions. Such tools are often used for sales cycles that are relatively short. Alternatively, CRMs help organizations manage their sales processes, assign sales representatives tasks, and keep their databases organized. Minimize your manual tasks and automate your busywork by using an MA tool.
2. Goal: MA platforms help you improve marketing workflows, drive qualified leads, and measure marketing's contribution to ROI. By implementing a CRM system, you can improve the performance of sales representatives and increase productivity.
3. Business goals: The main purpose of marketing automation is to shorten the purchase cycle. It is useful for B2C businesses that don't need to reach out to clients extensively or guide them through complex sales processes. CRM is of benefit to businesses that have long sales cycles.
Complex sales funnels are common among B2B and SaaS companies. Their sales funnel requires sales reps to persuade potential customers to advance to the next level of the funnel by converting them.
CRM's Features:
CRMs can provide your team with real, measurable benefits if they're used correctly. You might want to consider these benefits when deciding whether to use a CRM.
1. Marketing and sales alignment: CRMs can help with alignment between marketing and sales. The result will be a better understanding of each department's customers' sales funnel, allowing them to close deals faster.
2. Collaboration made easy: Your CRM keeps tabs on discussions, interactions, needs, contact information, and notes about your team members. You and your coworkers will be able to access its data easily if it's cloud-based, and it will always be up to date.
3 striking features of CRM
1. Marketing tailored to the customer's needs: Depending on the customer's position in the sales process, you can reach out to them with tailored messages.
2. Personalized communications: By storing detailed information about your customers, you can provide a more personalized experience. You will be able to create more relevant and personalized messages and outreach - both in human and automated campaigns - as you continue to gather data and insights about your audience, industry, and market.
3. Proactive outreach: The CRM can inform the user when some action is required. Being proactive and educated in your sales and customer service saves you time and makes your current and prospective customers feel special.
Marketing Automations tools Features:
To understand how marketing automation works, we must know the benefits of automating our marketing. Consider the benefits of automation. The tool takes an otherwise time-consuming and tedious task, automates it, so you can spend your time on more productive tasks. The best marketing automation tools offer the following features:
1. User segmentation: A marketing campaign cannot function without user segmentation. You will have customers that behave differently regardless of who you are or what you do. Your customers and leads can be grouped into segments according to their behavior, enabling you to create targeted campaigns.
2. Make your sales lead more accurate: Poor-quality leads are a waste of money and time. With marketing automation, you will be able to generate highly targeted leads, which will increase the earnings potential of your sales team.
3. Improved interactions with customers: With marketing automation, you can centralize client information so your sales staff has access to it at all times. It enables them to interact more effectively with potential customers.
Customer behavior of automation Features
1. Automated emails targeted towards specific customer behavior: A marketing automation system is essential for automated emails. Send emails tailored to specific leads based on their behaviors and actions.
These emails will contain relevant information based on where the lead is in the funnel.
2. Increased efficiency: Marketing automation can be a great benefit to your business because it can increase your efficiency, eliminate the tedium of repetitive tasks, automate your busywork, and help you focus on what's important.
CRM or Marketing Automation tool: Which is better for your company?
This is a tricky question because the answer always depends on where in the funnel your prospects are. Since both platforms are often able to sync data, you'll be able to gain access to all data in one place. By synchronizing data both ways, the sales team and customer service team can communicate regarding sales processes and can see customer history.
As an alternative to investment into two separate systems, or if you do not wish to make two separate investments, you might decide on a system that includes a relationship between marketing automation and CRM capabilities.
Final Thought
Because CRM marketing automation is a much broader tool, you'll find a wide variety of tools available for enhancing your marketing efforts. However, This can be quite confusing and difficult. Hence, speak with a marketing cloud consultant to simplify things.
Featured image by Chris Liverani on Unsplash